The term “packaging” refers to the collection of different components that surround a product from the time of its production until its use. It typically serves many purposes, often simultaneously, such as providing protection from physical damage during shipping and handling, theft deterrence, inhibiting contamination, providing protection from electrical damage due to electrostatic discharge, etc., preventing tampering, inhibiting product degradation, and the like.
In recent years, blister packaging has become a primary form of packaging for many products, such as toys, hardware, electronics, and medications. The primary component of a blister pack is a cavity made in a formable layer, which usually is made of a type of thermoformed plastic. In some cases, the formable layer is folded back onto itself, thereby sealing the cavity and forming a “clamshell” package. More typically, a lidding seal of metal foil is joined to the formable layer as a backing layer to seal the cavities thereby forming one or more enclosed reservoirs.
As blister packaging has become rather ubiquitous, there has been increasing interest in improving its utility by adding intelligence. Referred to as “smart,” “active,” or “connected” packaging, such packages include sensors and monitoring circuitry that can be used to provide product status, monitor freshness, track temperature exposure, record shocks imparted to the package, send an alert when one or more product units have been removed from a package, and the like. Further, it is possible to include complex product codes that are very difficult to copy, thereby frustrating counterfeit attempts. As a result, such added intelligence can enhance theft deterrence, inhibit product counterfeiting, enable tracking of product end-to-end (i.e., from production to the consumer), etc.
Unfortunately, conventional approaches for providing intelligent packaging are typically complex, expensive and often easily damaged.
The simplest prior-art approach relies on patterned electrical traces that are arranged such that they are broken during the removal of a unit from the package. For multi-unit blister packs, a separate trace is normally disposed over each reservoir. Electronic circuitry monitors the resistance of each trace and generates a signal when infinite resistance for one of the traces is detected. Unfortunately, incorporating patterned traces into a blister pack requires a significant modification of conventional packaging approaches. As a result, it adds significant complexity and cost. Further, narrow conductive traces are subject to corrosion and physical damage that can give rise to false indications of unit removal.
Another prior-art smart-packaging approach relies on optical monitoring of product units contained in a package. The need to include active optical sources, as well as detectors, significantly increases packaging costs, however. Further, such devices are notoriously power hungry, which shortens the life of a battery used to power them.
Yet another conventional smart-packaging approach employs radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that are associated with each unit contained in a package. Although this enables highly reliable tracking of the products packaged, these approaches require specialized base stations capable of energizing and reading the RFID tags. Further, the range over which the RFID tags are operable is fairly short. Still further, most RFID-based approaches require patterning of the metal-foil lidding-seal layer to form the requisite antenna that enables RF communication with the tag.
The need for a simple, lower-cost smart-packaging approach that enables end-to-end tracking of a packaged product remains, as yet, unmet.